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Finding The Candidate Keys

The document provides examples to demonstrate how to find candidate keys of a relation. The steps are: 1) Find the attribute closure given the functional dependencies. 2) Identify attributes that only appear on the right side of trivial dependencies. 3) Check if those attributes plus their closure equals the full relation - if so, they form a candidate key. Four examples are worked through to showcase the process.

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Innareddy Allam
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375 views2 pages

Finding The Candidate Keys

The document provides examples to demonstrate how to find candidate keys of a relation. The steps are: 1) Find the attribute closure given the functional dependencies. 2) Identify attributes that only appear on the right side of trivial dependencies. 3) Check if those attributes plus their closure equals the full relation - if so, they form a candidate key. Four examples are worked through to showcase the process.

Uploaded by

Innareddy Allam
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Finding the candidate keys

The first step in the process of finding a normal form and decomposing a relation is to find the candidate
keys. This is a set of examples to find them:

Example 1
R = (ABCDE), F = {A -> C, E -> D, B -> C}

Ok , so the first step in finding the candidate keys is to find the attribute closure given F.

A+ = AC
B+ = BC
C+ = C
D+ = D
E+ = DE

From this information we need to find the candidate keys. Any attribute that only appears on the right
side in a trivial dependency must be in the candidate key. For this, that includes ABE. Does ABE+ get us
to a candidate key? ABE+ = ABCDE – yes it does. The candidate key is ABE.

Example 2

R = ABCDE, F = {A -> BE, C -> BE, B -> D}

Ok, lets compute the attribute closure:

A+ = ABDE
B+ = BD
C+ = CBDE
D+ = D
E+ = E

The 2 attributes that only appear on the right side in a trivial are AC. Is AC a candidate key? Yes.
Example 3

R = ABCDEF, F = {A -> B, B -> D, C -> D, E -> F}

Let’s compute the attribute closures:

A+ = ABD
B+ = BD
C+ = CD
D+ = D
E+ = EF

Ok, let’s start with those attributes that only appear on the right side in trivial FDs. They are ACE . ACE+
= ABCDEF, so ACE is a candidate key.

Example 4

R = ABCD, F={AB -> C, BC -> D, CD -> A}

Computing the attribute closure:

The single letters are all trivial.

AB+ = ABCD, BC+=ABCD, CD+=ACD

So our candidate keys are AB and BC.. Why isn’t BCD+ a candidate key? Because it is not minimal. The
D is extraneous since BC -> D.

Example 5

R = ABCD, F={A -> BCD, C -> A}

Attribute closure:

A+ - ABCD
B+ = B
C+ = ABCD
D+ = D

Our candidate keys are A and C.

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